Armchair BEA Wrap-Up

Design credit: Emily of Emily's Reading Room

Whew! What a week. School ends next week so we are in the midst of end-of-year chaos. I wasn't sure if I would be able to keep up with Armchair BEA and had in fact never heard of it until the evening before it began. I am so glad Jen and Kellee at Teach Mentor Texts mentioned it or I would have missed out on the fun.

My blog is not only a book blog. It is also about teaching in the library and my learning experiences. Most of the blogs I typically visit are like that. We review books too, but that isn't necessarily the main focus. Promoting books and discussing books with many people is a big part of what I do, but my blog is also a place to reflect on and share what is going on with me and my students on our learning journey. What was cool about Armchair BEA is that I was able to visit many blogs that are more focused on book reviewing. I noticed some things that I should definitely add to my blog (like a disclosure and review policy) and gave me ideas for posts. I have been sort of bumbling along wondering what I should do on certain days, how many days a week I should post and all kinds of things. I  haven't truly had a plan. Many of the blogs I visited provided some direction for me and gave me inspiration for getting things planned out better over the summer. 

I also gained a new appreciation for Audrey (@audrey_gonzalez). She is a co-blogger at Rich in Color and she had the original idea for it too. As we were setting up that blog together she had a very specific plan and knew exactly what we needed and how many days we would post & what would be happening on each of the days. She had a distinct vision. I have never gotten to that point here on Reading Through Life. In a way, I am glad that I have sort of bumbled through trying many things, but I am ready to sit down with my list of ideas and fine tune my vision for this blog. Now I have some more tools to do it and many great blogs and bloggers to interact with on the way. Some that I visited were Jen and Kellee of course, Tattooed Books, Bookcase to Heaven, Icy Cold Reads, The Bookmark Blog, The Englishist, Book Twirps (who have a great YA book release post every week), and Book 'em Adventures.

I also found out about a few fun memes that I may try like Top Ten Tuesday from Broke and Bookish, Roadtrip Wednesday at YA Highway, and Waiting on Wednesday from Breaking the Spine. 

I was bummed that I couldn't be at BEA in person, but when Kelly (@catagator) over at Stacked, told about her experience, I feel like maybe I got the better deal even without ARCs or other free stuff. What I wanted was to meet some bloggers that are at various stages in the process, get some ideas for my own blogging, and have fun. Mission accomplished.

Armchair BEA: Children's Literature

Since I am a teacher librarian in an elementary school, children's literature is a large part of my reading life. I also happen to enjoy young adult lit, so I don't actually have a lot of time for books that are written for adults.

I really love children's and young adult literature. Picture books are just in a class by themselves. I like the length of them - that the story is compact and every page is meaningful. It's like poetry. Since there is not a lot of room, the authors have to be concise and every word is important.  I think writing short novels for young people is the most challenging for authors so I am always impressed when they write a brilliant middle grade book. Young adult is my all time favorite though.

Here are some of my favorites from the past year or two:

Picture Books

Middle Grade

Young Adult

All cover images from Goodreads

What children's lit and young adult titles captured you this past year?

Armchair BEA: Non-fiction

When I was a child, my favorite non-fiction was biography. Other than that, my non-fiction reading was usually dictated by the fiction I was reading. I read a lot of historical fiction and would get curious about the real events surrounding the book. I remember reading piles of books about World War II and then the history of Russia when I was in middle school. My non-fiction reading was almost always for a purpose, rather than for entertainment except for some of the biographies.

It wasn't until I was in my thirties before I began to start randomly reading non-fiction in much the same way I choose fiction. Non-fiction was finally something to read for fun. I still read more fiction, but I am likely to pick up something like The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements (which was hilarious) or The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary for no reason at all beyond curiosity.


I prefer narrative non-fiction and have consumed several excellent examples in the past few years. Most of my favorites are young adult and children's. Here are some of the best of the best in no particular order:

Do you read a lot of non-fiction? What is it about non-fiction that you enjoy?

Armchair BEA: Genre Fiction

The genre that I return to over and over again is fantasy. In middle school I started out with Anne McCaffrey and moved on to Tolkien, but my taste in fantasy has varied over the years. I tend to like the high fantasy and especially the fantasy with a bit of fairy tale. Some of my all time favorite fairy tale retellings are:

Cinder

Beauty

Spindle's End

East

The Frog Princess

Deerskin

Rapunzel's Revenge

A Tale Dark and Grimm

The Goose Girl

Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow

The Stinky Cheese Man

The True Story of the Three Little Pigs

Beastly

Ash

Ice

The Paper Bag Princess

Lon Po Po

Cinderella Skeleton

Breadcrumbs

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

The Princess Curse

Tattercoats

Book of a Thousand Days

Wildwood Dancing

Ella

Just Ella

Enchantment

What genre pulls you in and enchants you?